The fight over net neutrality played out in a doubleheader of Congressional hearings on Wednesday, with tech industry executives both supporting and jabbing at Republicans' newfound love of open Internet policies.

In a House hearing in the morning, key players who have supported the telecom industry told lawmakers that they favor keeping the Internet free from interference by Internet service providers, but labeling ISPs as public utilities would impose difficult burdens on their business.

If the Federal Communications Commission were to draft new ISP-as-public-utility rules –— often referred to as Title II, a provision of the Communications Act of 1934 — it would make it tough for ISPs to invest in innovation, they argued. Legislation enacted by Congress would be a better way to chart the future of the Internet, they said.

Instead of leaving the FCC to find statutory authority in existing provisions of law, we must work together to craft new legislation that establishes unambiguous rules of the road for ISPs while also clearly defining the parameters of the FCC's authority," Michael Powell, CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, told the lawmakers.

Other tech officials at the hearing openly supported President Obama's approach, which calls for the FCC to apply Title II to service providers. Under this approach, ISPs would be prohibited from providing faster speeds or better treatment to their affiliates or to third parties willing to pay for faster Internet lanes for their content.

"We support the outright ban on paid prioritization, blocking and throttling " of Internet speeds," said Chad Dickerson, CEO of e-commerce site Etsy.

Tom Wheeler, the FCC chairman, hasn't specifically committed to Title II, though his recent comments indicate he's leaning that way. He will propose and circulate a new set of net neutrality rules to other FCC commissioners on Feb. 5, and a vote will take place on Feb. 26, wrapping up a drawn-out process that attracted more than 4 million public comments.

In the past, Republican lawmakers have generally sided with large ISPs, such as Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner Cable, and said new FCC rules aren't needed because competition and consumer demand would dictate how services are sold.

But they've been caught off guard by the visceral and overwhelmingly pro-net neutrality consumer reaction among their constituents, who see the issue beyond the political battle lines. With the FCC seemingly ready to enact stringent rules that would adopt Title II, lawmakers proposed new draft legislation late last week that would replace the FCC as the guiding authority on net neutrality.

The new legislation — by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D. and Reps. Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Greg Walden, R-Ore. — would ban ISPs from offering paid prioritization for faster lanes and prohibit any attempts by ISPs to block or deliberately slow content. But it would prohibit the FCC from classifying ISPs as public utilities and allow them to offer "specialized services."

The draft defines specialized services as "services other than broadband Internet access service that are offered over the same network." But net neutrality proponents fear the exception could be abused by ISPs.

"This could create a huge loophole if, for example, specialized services involved the prioritization of some content and services," Paul Misener, Amazon.com's vice president for global public policy, said at the hearing. It's "just like proscribed 'paid prioritization,' the only difference being that the content or service prioritized came from the broadband Internet access service provider itself, instead of a third party."

Legislation should not weaken the FCC but instead should make sure it has authority including the ability to discourage "digital redlining," with Net providers refusing to expand into low-income neighborhoods, Nicol Turner-Lee of the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council, told the Senate Commerce Committee at an afternoon hearing. "It imposes, in essence, digital segregation," she said.

"The time is now to get past the morass of a debate that has been lingering for more than a decade," Turner-Lee said.

Back in 2010, the FCC created open Internet rules -- all legal content on the Internet should be treated equally by ISPs and not blocked or deliberately slowed -- but those were overturned in January 2014 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Once set by the FCC or Congress, the new net neutrality rules could widely impact how cable providers, Netflix and other video and audio companies deploy their streaming services. Some TV networks are expanding their streaming video options for customers who don't subscribe to pay-TV.

The future of the "Internet of Things" — in which everyday objects like refrigerators and thermostats are connected to home Wi-Fi — will depend heavily on the premise of fast, unobstructed online connections.